Apigee Launches Exchange to Drive API Economy

As the development of a digital economy based on application programming interfaces continues to gain momentum, organizations are running into issues relating to scale that are slowing the growth of the overall API economy.

Looking to give the emerging API economy an additional shot of stimulus, Apigee today opened the Apigee API Exchange, a mechanism through which developers and publishers of APIs can more easily discover and invoke APIs.

According to David Andrzejek, director of sales and business development for Apigee, APIs have essentially emerged as a distribution channel through which organizations expose data. Applications that invoke that data are increasingly responsible for a huge percentage of the Web traffic that any organization receives.

The challenge, says Andrzejek, is that developers not only have a hard time discovering relevant APIs, there’s no consistent way to invoke them. The Apigee API Exchange is designed to solve that problem using a central repository to discover and access APIs that organizations expose. Previously, Apigee also moved to make it easier to discover patterns across how APIs are being used via the addition of a Big Data analytics capability.

Initially, the Apigee API Exchange will focus on the telecommunications industry where developers of mobile applications are trying to invoke network APIs provided by carriers such as AT&T. But as Apigee expands the scope of the API Exchange, Apigee will take on API interoperability issues across a range of industries.

Like most economies, the emerging API economy is fragile. Broken APIs, in particular, make it hard for developers to consistently invoke a service. But as more organizations begin to participate in that economy via centralized services, the easier it will become to not only ensure that APIs work consistently, but that the actual playing field remains relatively level.

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